[pianotech] bass or plainsteel strings?

[Noah Frere]

Thanks for your reply. I have also been increasingly dissatisfied with
Universal Strings. However, even ordering specific strings often pose
troubled matches I've noticed lately. If I receive one more poorly matched
string, I'm going to order both bichords...
Anyway, I should also have known that since 2 complete notes were out, there
would be no chance of replacing with Universals, since I need 2 pairs. These
were indeed copperwound, and I'm afraid since they're at the break that the
tension may be a bit high. I will ask the stringmaker if he can do something
about that. I did not measure the adjacent strings.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Joe DeFazio <defaziomusic at verizon.net>wrote:

> Hi Noah,
> As David Porritt mentioned, the hitch pins (and the bridge pins) will tell
> you if you have a bichord or a trichord.  However, some cheaper American
> pianos of that era (and Currier certainly counts as cheap!) use both wound
> bichords and steel bichords in the low tenor.  So, if you see copper
> bichords to the left and steel bichords to the right, you will have to look
> carefully at the surfaces of the damper felt and hammer strike point, where
> the difference will most likely be discernible.
>
> If copper is the "correct answer," I would advise against using universal
> strings, which one of my friends calls "universally wrong."  They never
> match in timbre, and their inharmonicity is usually so wildly different that
> they don't tune well with their neighbors.  Why "fix" a piano so that it
> sounds even worse than it did before it broke? (Yes, for the wise guys out
> there, it is indeed possible for even a Currier to sound worse than it did
> when new!)
>
> If you make accurate and precise measurements of the speaking length (hitch
> to speaking bridge pin length, hitch to upper termination, hitch to tuning
> pin) of the missing strings and their lower neighbors, as well as core and
> wrap diameters for the lower neighbors, plus twist length near the hitch pin
> loop, a good string maker ought to be able to scale and manufacture new
> strings which will sound much better than universals.  If four strings in a
> row broke, though, that may be a clue that the original scaling was
> improper.  Ask the string maker to double-check the breaking percentage of
> the newly designed strings before manufacturing them, and to adjust a little
> for safety if necessary.  You probably don't want to have the new strings
> break just like the old....
>
> Joe DeFazio
> Pittsburgh
>
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